Pigeon for Gmail

Pigeon is a powerful CRM and automation suite for Gmail.

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Productivity

I built Pigeon to solve my own needs and spend less time inside Gmail by automating mundane tasks such as email follow-ups and being able to scale with a CRM.

February 24, 2020 $1,000 MRR! (harder than I anticipated)

Some of you might know my story, but I’m the founder of Starter Story. Over the past year, I’ve been working on a product called Pigeon.

Anyways, Pigeon just hit $1K MRR, and for me, it’s been a pretty crazy and unexpected journey, and I learned a lot.

Not all revenue is created equal, and for me, building a SaaS was a new type of challenge and I feel like $1K is a good milestone to reflect! And not because it’s $1,000, but because it equates to about 40 paying customers, which feels like a lot (for me).

DISCLAIMER: If you’re looking for a case study about how to grow a SaaS fast, this is probably not the one. This is mostly a look back at how I slowly reached 40 paying customers, what worked, what struggles I faced, and what I learned.

It also feels like a big milestone because I worked so damn hard to get here. Every customer felt like a big win, and every churn, lost opportunity, etc felt like a loss.

So, I wanted to write my thoughts while they’re still fresh and show you the real truth & honesty behind the last 10 months.

Here's a few takeaways, maybe it helps someone else building a similar product and just getting started:

Anticipate very slow growth in the early days

Growth was a lot slower than expected.

In the month after I launched (June), I only added 1 paying customer!! 1 CUSTOMER!! It’s pretty crazy to be working so hard on something and you only have 1 person sign up in 30 days.

And the next month after that? 2 CUSTOMERS!! Haha!

Churn is real and it sucks

I've never built a SaaS before, so I never really experienced churn first-hand.

Personally, every churn felt like a gut punch, especially in the early days, when things were less validated and I associated the success of the product with my own self-worth (I do that less now).

Eventually, I got better at dealing with “rejection” though (mostly). Some things that help:

  • Often, churn is completely out of your control, and can be due to something happening for the customer, like their business idea not working/pivoting in a new direction, etc.
  • Don’t assume anything and try to get the answers. When a customer cancels, knowledge is power. Try your best to learn WHY.
  • Be empathetic and put yourself in the customer's shoes - if they are churning because they aren’t getting enough value from your product - that can be an opportunity. When I lost customers in the early days because I didn’t have XYZ feature - now that feature is a selling point!

Discouragement and self-doubt

Mentally, I also went through some hard times. Not all bad though, but there were definitely some days... Being a solo founder certainly doesn’t help here either.

I got a YC interview that completely sidetracked me, and getting rejected from that felt like a gut punch because of all the work I put into prepping. I didn’t expect to get in, nor do I regret applying, but the interview process consumed my mind for a 2-3 week period back in October. Not much work on the product got done during those weeks, and when I look back at that "YC time" I remember feeling very stressed and unhappy.

In general, the “slow growth” got to me, at times. Compared to Starter Story, it felt like I was working double overtime to make a nickel.

But I did find some coping mechanisms for this self-doubt, here are a few:

What worked:

Don't want to bore you too much in this milestone, but I wrote a bit more about my journey, and also what worked, such as:

  • Direct sales
  • Building an email list and announcing features constantly
  • Quora
  • Using a chat popup thingy to your advantage
  • The Google audit
  • and more.

You can check out the full post here.

Thanks

I want to thank everyone that helped me along this journey - looking back it's amazing how many people I've met through this IndieHacker community over just a couple of short years.

If there's anything I can do to help you guys, please don't hesitate to ask.

July 4, 2019 10 Paying Customers!

After launching about a month ago, we have officially reached 10 paying customers!

At $29/month, this puts us at $290 MRR.

This is also a first for me - I've never had 10 paying customers for a SaaS before. The last SaaS I built struggled to get users and never reached 10 customers.

Feels good :)

I also need to work on spreading the word better with Pigeon. Growth has been slow and I've been pretty quiet. I'm working on forcing myself to talk about it more, hence this IH milestone!

I'll also be working a lot on content marketing that's the marketing "plan" I have for the long term.

About

I built Pigeon to solve my own needs and spend less time inside Gmail by automating mundane tasks such as email follow-ups and being able to scale with a CRM.